Today we’re releasing a new product called Parachute.
Parachute is a simple Windows XP/Vista/7 application with one purpose: to back up your Basecamp files. As long-time Basecamp users we realized there was no easy way to get the files we’ve uploaded. The Basecamp API and export utilities don’t provide them, so the only way to backup your files is to click on each link and save the files manually or use a Firefox download extension. We have several years worth of projects stored in Basecamp; it would take weeks to do this manually.
Backup your Basecamp files
Here’s where Parachute comes in. Parachute backs up all the files for your Basecamp projects to your hard drive. You can back up just one project in a just a couple of minutes or you can backup everything. I made a short screencast that shows how Parachute works:
Parachute archived all the files from our Basecamp account in a couple of hours. That’s nearly three gigabytes of data and 4,000 files from more than 50 projects.
Create a complete HTML export
Basecamp offers a really handy HTML export feature that gives you all your data as website you can browse locally. Alas, this export doesn’t include any links to your files.
Parachute will backup your files and add them back into Basecamp’s HTML export. Links to files in messages and to-do lists will work exactly as they did in the original project.
You now have a complete HTML archive of a project you can give to a client or save for future reference.
Just $69
For the next week or so we’re offering Parachute for $69. You buy it right from the Parachute website and start backing up your data in just a couple of minutes.Why Parachute?
For the last couple of years we’ve been working on a product called Kiiro--a SharePoint application that’s similar to Basecamp in a lot of ways. We thought there would be a market for a product that (a) improved the overall user experience of SharePoint, and (b) provided some of the same lightweight project management functionality as Basecamp.
And while that assumption wasn’t entirely wrong, that market didn’t prove to be as big as we’d hoped. But we created a number of interesting components for Kiiro--one of which was a Basecamp migration utility.
We decided to turn that utility into a standalone product, and that became Parachute.
So where’s the Mac version?
We know a lot of Basecamp users are also Apple customers. We’ve tested Parachute on Macs running Windows XP through Parallels/VM Ware. But we haven’t completed a Mac-native build. Hopefully we’ll get to it in the not-too-distant future.
Posted in Announcements on April 14, 2010
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